New Hope for the Stupid

 The average person of only average intelligence. And half of us are below it.

This is an abiding problem. Stupidity causes great suffering, many ruined lives, many deaths. The folly of the world has always troubled me, and in my old age I have grown reconciled to the reality that this will never change. Stupid people are not smart enough to recognize wisdom when they hear it. Like the Duning-Kruger effect, if you are not intelligent, you lack the very mental equipment to recognize intelligence.

To get a sense of how much it matters, compare life in Japan, where average IQ is slightly higher than the world average, with life in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it is lower. Japan: 106.4. Somalia: 67.7. You can see the result in GDP, in general social order, in quality of life.

Or compare how Jewish Americans have fared since the Holocaust, with how African Americans have fared since the Civil Rights Act, not to mention since slavery. The Jews came from a lower base line, attempted genocide, and rose quickly to a position of great wealth and social prominence. African-Americans are still in deficit. People avoid saying so, but the most probable reason is IQ.

Even without formal democracy, unfortunately, everything devolves towards the mean. This world is built for average people: there are so many of them.

It occurs to me that we may actually be about to break through this barrier, thanks to AI. Experts predict that within a few years, machine intelligence will greatly outpace human intelligence. Surely even stupid people are smart enough to take advantage of such advice? Even if they don’t understand it. They might resist listening to smarter people, out of envy and pride—the perennial cause of anti-semitism. But if the average person is getting the advice from their smartphone, this may not apply.  

At least there is hope. The world might quickly become better, and everyone’s life more livable.

Sowell and Intelligence

 

Thomas Sowell argues against the idea that intelligence can vary by race, pointing out that different populations have risen over history, while others have fallen back. China was more culturally advanced than Europe from the Dark Ages to about 1500. Then Europe sped ahead. Southern Europe, Greece and Rome, was more advanced that Northern Europe until the Renaissance; but by the Enlightenment the South had slipped into relative backwardness. 

The fortunes of nations change, and intellectual leadership seems available to any group at random.

The first point to make about this argument is that it acknowledges, contrary to current “anti-racist” ideology, that cultures can indeed be superior or inferior: Chinese culture was more advanced than European until 1500, and so forth. This makes nonsense of the claim that the “Western” education of Canadian First Nations children, for example, was “cultural genocide.”  Or the insistence that an English curriculum must feature an equal number of African or aboriginal authors, or it is racist.

The second point is that the principle of human equality is not an assertion that all people are equal in intelligence. That claim is obviously false. It is that all people are equal in human dignity, in moral worth. They are equal in the eyes of God, and all made in the divine image. This understanding has been perverted as we have lost our religious principles. We forget that liberal democracy is built on Christianity.

Individuals differ in innate intelligence, according to casual observation and IQ testing. It is therefore reasonable to assume—and demonstrable with IQ testing--that families and bloodlines also differ in innate intelligence. They share, after all, much of their genetics. Then, as it is reasonable to assume that intelligence, if innate, can run in families, it is reasonable to assume that intelligence runs in nationalities or “races,” as they too share some of their genetics.

We can observe that different ethnic groups vary in their athletic abilities. Black Africans dominate running sports at the Olympics; black Americans dominate basketball, boxing, and football. Canadian and American native people have always been prominent in sports: Tom Longboat, Jim Thorpe. As this is visibly true, it stands to reason that genetic groups can also vary in their intellectual abilities. 

And we see this in different breeds of domestic animals: they can and have been bred for intelligence, in order to perform given tasks. A border collie is usually much smarter than an afghan hound. Intelligence is therefore innate, and can be bred.

One does not, by the way, need to believe in the theory of evolution to know that this is so. Breeding for specific traits can be observed in the wild, even though the actual emergence of new species cannot.

It is only politics that makes us resist the premise that different races or ethnicities differ in average intelligence. Noting, of course, that this is a question of averages, and individuals must be evaluated as individuals: not by the colour of heir skin, but the content of their character.

It seems reasonable to assume that, just as domestic animals are bred for desired characteristics, any culture will spontaneously breed for whatever characteristics it most values. Those who possess that particular characteristic will have more wealth and more opportunity for survival, be seen as more desirable marriage partners, and therefore will have a greater opportunity to marry and have more children. So a culture that values, admires, and rewards learning and intelligence will grow over time more intelligent. A culture that values music will become more musical. A culture that values beauty will grow more beautiful. And a culture that requires athletic skill and fast reflexes for survival and prosperity will favour and develop in this direction, rather than intellectually.

And indeed, differences in average IQ among racial groups are measurable by IQ test.

The common argument, of course, is that these tests are culturally biased. This is an obvious possibility. But if so, how explain why East Asians do better on European-designed IQ tests than Europeans do?

This difference in average intelligence does not yet explain how cultures can rise and fall, how the baton of intellectual progress can pass from one group to another, as Sowell notes. One explanation is that intelligence is not the only factor that leads to cultural success. Some groups can no doubt be held down by oppression or discrimination. Some environmental factor may give you the free time to think and to innovate: discovering a vein of silver in your territory; being the sole source of purple dye; striking oil. The challenges of the environment can also change, as they do for evolution in the animal world. Some outside threat may make different talents more valuable. Or some technological innovation: the development of agriculture, say, or writing. 

These, over time, will change the breeding pattern.

A challenging environment, causing difficulty in survival, marriage, and childrearing, will accentuate the particular virtues and values of a group. Conversely, an environment of too much ease and opportunity, where everyone can easily survive and raise children, should cause a regression to the mean. This too can explain why groups can rise and fall on the civilizational totem pole.

This all raises an obvious concern: couldn’t a government decide to control breeding to produce a superior race—the Nazi concept?

But even given all this, even if that were desirable, and not a violation of the basic human right to reproduce, that is a mad idea. To see the effects of better breeding takes multiple generations; governments, and government policies, never last that long. 

One quick way to produce the effect is through immigration. Immigrant societies have tended to benefit from this, at least in the days that immigration was difficult and challenging—so that the best and the brightest in their own societies naturally self-selected. The US, Singapore, Canada, Australia. One could, theoretically, screen immigrants by IQ test.

The other way to do it, and the way it has been most commonly done, is to change the cultural values. Which is to say, a new religion. Northern Europe was raised to the level of Southern Europe as it Christianized. China, I believe, benefitted from the strength of Confucianism. Religion is the setting and discernment of values: it is worship, “worth-ship.” 

How to Make Canada Better

 

Taking the Confucian civil service exam

I find myself growing impatient that the governments of Iran, Russia, and China have not yet fallen. But this is naïve. Even if they do, in all likelihood, we are not going to get much better government soon. There is an inevitable limiting factor.

It is that the average person is average. The social world, all government, is built by and for average people. 

In a democracy, the government is not going to be any smarter, on average of the population. Nor has anyone come up with a better system. As Churchill observed, democracy is the worst possible form of government—until you consider all the others. 

It is not just that no other system has reliably produced leaders smarter than the average. We are not democracies because we believe the average person is always right. We are democracies because each individual is sovereign, and has the right and duty to decide, as much as possible, for himself. Human dignity demands that he have some input.

China for millennia did rather well on something like the Platonic system: government was in the hands of those who could pass a comprehensive examination. It was in the hands, in theory, of the intelligentsia. That ought to lead to government by the more intelligent, and for many centuries it did seem to. But that began to falter about five hundred years ago. This system could not compete with the Europeans, either in terms of organization, economic prosperity, or military power. 

We are seeing the same collapse in the modern Western academy. The system is producing dumber and dumber results. It depends, after all, on those already there setting the tests and choosing who joins the cabal. There is nothing to ensure that those already there know what they are doing.

When Europe pulled ahead of China, it was snot because of democracy. Europe was not yet democratic. It was aristocratic. The old European upper class was based on the idea that people could be educated from birth for government. That worked well for a time, driven, I would argue, by a strong and consistent Christian ideology of service, the chivalric ideal. But this system too could not successfully compete with democracy. Rulers would still be of only average intelligence, and with a failure of faith, class interest could easily come to supersede the general good.

Modern dictatorships are worst of all: those who rise to the top are those most driven by an urge for power and prepared to be most ruthless.

One solution that could be better than democracy, in producing good government, might be to appoint to office based on IQ. Unlike the old Confucian tests, IQ tests are objective and have the benefit of the scientific method of data collection. Contrary to much uninformed and envious opinion, IQ is the most reliable data point we have in all of the social sciences. It correlates well up to a fairly high level, well above average, with such other checks as academic and business success.

But could a subset of the highly intelligent be relied on to govern in the general interest, instead of for their own interests as a group? Perhaps not. And we still have the issue of human dignity, the right and duty of the individual to choose for himself.

Perhaps the best solution of all is available to a country like Canada, because of our high levels of immigration. Retain democracy, but accept immigrants based on IQ.

Currently, Canada chooses based on income and education. This means Canada is skimming off the upper classes of the Third World. But the Third World is poor because it has a corrupt upper class. The best do not rise to the top, and those who do will probably be corrupt.

IQ would be better, fairer, and would, over time, ensure that Canada is more prosperous, better governed, and a centre for world culture.

Nobody has the never to suggest this, even though it would be in everyone’s best interest.

Why? I credit envy of the more intelligent. Everyone resents anyone smarter than themself.

It is Foolish to Envy the Extremely Intelligent

 

https://www.quora.com/Do-smart-people-tend-to-be-rejected-by-society-because-of-jealousy

Dawkins and Eugenics

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is apparently in trouble for saying that eugenics would work.

I am no fan of Dawkins’s philosophy.

But he is a geneticist, and he is simply stating a fact, obvious to anyone who knows genetics. Or any farmer or gardener.

If your political views require denying reality, there is something wrong with your politics, not with reality.

Of course it is possible to selectively breed for desirable characteristics. We do it all the time, and have always done it, with plants and animals. Why would it not work with humans?

The rap against eugenics is not that it would not work, but that no government has the moral right to decide who may breed, and with whom. Government belongs to the people; the people do not belong to the government.

To make it turn on purely practical issues—that it would not work—is to endorse it, the moment it is plain to you that it does.

In fact, we all practice eugenics individually. What attracts us in a member of the opposite sex? Whether we are aware of it or not, we are selecting what we think will be the best genes. We are deciding what characteristics we want to pass on to our children.

And it is not just individuals. Cultures also spontaneously practice genetics. Whatever that given culture values, it is breeding for.

This accounts for that other scientific fact nobody is allowed to mention now without being declared a racist: that different cultures have different levels of average IQ.

In the tribal societies that until recently dominated sub-Saharan Africa, those who rose to the top socially would be the best hunters and the best warriors. These cultures therefore selectively bred for fast physical reflexes, physical strength, and physical endurance. It is not simple “survival of the fittest”; but such a man would be widely admired, have his choice of marital partners, and be able to raise more children in better health. So sub-Saharan Africans dominate in sports and athletics. High intelligence has little value in a tribal society; so they did not breed for IQ. Sub-Saharan Africans have a relatively low average IQ, and that is now part of their genetic makeup.

In the Confucian system in China, by contrast, those who rose to the top socially did so by passing rigorous academic exams; or, failing that, by success in trade. So the brightest got their choice of marriage partners, and were able to raise more children in better health. Athleticism and fast reflexes had little value in such a settled society; so they did not breed for them. East Asians have a relatively high average IQ, and that is now part of their genetic makeup.

Ashkenazi Jews had similar views: social prestige was based on learning, or success was in trade. As a result, they are the second cultural group with an unusually high average IQ.

And so it goes. Every culture practices eugenics informally as part of the culture. Some cultures breed for courage, some for physical beauty, some for even temper, and so forth.

To admit this obvious truth is “racist” only to people who do not understand the concept of human equality. It does not mean that everyone is the same; that is obviously untrue. It means that everyone is equal in intrinsic worth, equal in the eyes of God, and so must be treated equally by government.

"Race Science" and IQ

This recent article from The Guardian bemoans the idea that IQ varies with race, and calls it “bogus” and “debunked.”

I am no biologist, but I was under the impression this was actually generally accepted as fact by biologists; just not often talked about, because it is a political minefield.

So let’s see if we can grasp and accept the argument of the article.

To begin with, we have to read it halfway trough before we get to any actual factual statements on the issue. The first half of the article is all ad hominem, branding anyone who believes in a link between race and IQ as racist and “alt-right.” This does not inspire confidence in the political neutrality or scientific objectivity of the piece. But at last, we come to this:

“The first claim is that when white Europeans’ Cro-Magnon ancestors arrived on the continent 45,000 years ago, they faced more trying conditions than in Africa. Greater environmental challenges led to the evolution of higher intelligence. Faced with the icy climate of the north, Richard Lynn wrote in 2006, ‘less intelligent individuals and tribes would have died out, leaving as survivors the more intelligent.’”

The piece then argues that this is not a plausible explanation for the difference in IQ; on the grounds that agriculture, writing, and cities first appeared in Mesopotamia, which is not a cold country. And on the grounds that some prehistoric paint, fish hooks, and arrows have been found in Africa.

There are several non sequitors here. First, this or that particular theory as to why there is a racial difference in IQ does not really bear on the issue of whether there is a racial difference in IQ. Second, while Mesopotamia is not cold in winter, it is dry, and suffers periodic drought. This is an environmental challenge at least equivalent to that of a cold winter. Third, it is meaningless that there were fishhooks and arrows in prehistoric Africa. There is necessarily going to be some level of technology wherever humans are found. Or wicker birds, for that matter. What developed in Africa must be measured against what developed in other areas of comparable population over a comparable span of time.

“A second plank of the race science [sic] case goes like this: human bodies continued to evolve, at least until recently – with different groups developing different skin colours, predispositions to certain diseases, and things such as lactose tolerance. So why wouldn’t human brains continue evolving, too?”

The argument of the piece is that this is not good evidence, because the genetics underlying brain structure is far more complex than that underlying physical traits. So there may not have been enough time for the structure of the brain to diverge similarly.

This is certainly not disproof. It does nothing to show that there are NOT mental differences, only that we need not assume there are, based on this evidence.

And even at that, it does not seem to be right. Surely everyone can think, offhand, of at least one single mutation, not uncommon, that dramatically affects mental functioning: Down’s syndrome. And there are others. If then, just one mutation can affect mental functioning, it seems to follow that such differences would not have needed any greater length of time than skin colour, and so forth, to evolve.

The piece’s next argument is the familiar one that IQ tests do not reliably measure anything. This has some merit. Nothing in the social sciences is reliable. But, having said that, IQ seems to be about the most substantial thing we have in that field, in that it correlates so well with so many other factors. It makes no sense to go after IQ on these grounds, and not everything else in the social sciences.

Next the piece cites a Swiss study in which students were able to improve their IQ through swotting to the test. This would be interesting only if the improvements were great enough to account for the observed racial differences. But the present piece gives no figures. As a matter of course, those who develop IQ tests always do their level best to make the tests resistant to this.

The article does give two figures for a Minneapolis-based study of identical twins separated at birth, and the spread does indeed look very significant: 20 to 29 points. Since identical twins are identical genetically, any such variation must be accounted for by some other factor. But what the article does not note is that its own conclusion is the opposite of the conclusion of the study it is citing. The study found IQ to be 70% inherited (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2218526). The present article seems to be cherry-picking from the data to find individual cases that go furthest against the statistical norm. That does no more than to confirm the bare possibility that IQ differences of this magnitude are not genetic. And if you check Wikipedia on twin studies and IQ, it suggests the weight of evidence from twin studies remains that intelligence is mostly hereditary. Wikipedia, because of its open editing system, can presumably be taken as a neutral source fairly reflecting the consensus in a field. If anyone inserted anything controversial, someone else who was a specialist would be bound to be upset enough to soon edit it out.

The article’s net objection seems more substantial: the Flynn effect. Flynn found that in a variety of advanced countries, IQs have been rising steadily over the past 100 years, maybe thirty points on average over that century. Three points a decade. Cumulatively, that is certainly enough to account for any interracial difference in IQ, and it cannot be genetic. Nobody has a clear explanation for why it is happening, but the data seem clear.

Still, this is not a clincher. It is another negative argument: it shows that race and genetics are not a necessary, but still a sufficient, explanation for racial IQ differences.

Next, the piece tackles the common claim that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than the general population. “Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average.” Aha—so this difference cannot be genetic. It must be--????

On this one, the Guardian piece seems to be plain wrong. Apparently this is a common misrepresentation of what one early 20th century study was about. It was of people of all races pre-screened as having below average intelligence, and it only remarked, with surprise, that there were Askhenazi Jews among this number, Despite the common perception, even then, that they were unusually intelligent. The piece goes on to quote psychologist Carl Brigham saying Jews are no brighter than the rest of us back in 1923. Without noting that Brigham himself recanted his position and his paper by 1930. He said it “collapsed entirely” due to methodological errors.

So there we are. It seems it is not proven that IQ differs among races genetically. This is, on the other hand, both a perfectly reasonable, and, more than that, the most likely hypothesis.

Surely the reader has noticed how disproportionately often South American women win the big international beauty pageants. Why would that be? There are a lot more women in China and India.

Latin cultures put an unusually high premium on beauty. Doubt it, anyone who has not visited a Romance country. As a result, unusually beautiful women will have better marriage prospects there than elsewhere, will tend to marry more prosperous and more faithful husbands and so have more children. And so, over time, the culture naturally selects for feminine beauty. Why would this not be so?

Chinese culture distrusts beauty. So Chinese women are less likely to be beautiful.

If a culture values X, it will breed for X. It might be athleticism (Africa), musical ability (Ireland, Africa), ability with language (Ireland), martial valour (Greece), calm disposition (England), kindness (Philippines), or something else.

Deal with it: racial differences.

And so, as well, with intelligence and scholarship. If you want a good wife in China or among Eastern European Jews, you demonstrate your scholarship. Women will swoon, as will their parents. These cultures have for a couple of millennia been breeding for intelligence.

My students back in Korea, given the choice between becoming a professor or the president of a large corporation, thought it was a no-brainer. Be (or marry) a professor.

There seems nothing surprising about this.

People panic, because they feel it violates the sacred principle of human equality.

He do not understand the sacred principle of human equality.

No sane person ever, until recently, surely thought that everyone was equal in their abilities. How could that possibly be, any more than that all people must have red hair?

Human equality is equality in moral worth. We are all of equal moral value, and so have the right to be treated equally by one another and by government.

A Modest Proposal on Immigration

Average IQ around the world.

According to research, job interviews are of no value in choosing good employees. In fact, they are of worse than no value, because they can distract from meaningful measures. When a personal interview is not included, results improve.

This should have been self-evident without a study. What are interviews but an open invitation to prejudice? To form a judgment on someone after talking with them for a half hour is prejudice by definition. People are never so simple nor superficial that this can be done.

Unfortunately, personal interviews are becoming more popular. And the reason should be obvious: because they allow employers to discriminate. Not that they might want to otherwise, but all the “affirmative action” mandates from government make it necessary.

And those who suffer are not just those you might expect. Apparently, HR people, almost all female, regularly discriminate against good-looking women seeking employment. The interviewers don’t want the sexual competition.

There is, at the same time, a highly accurate predictor of future employee performance readily available. It has been tested and shown repeatedly to be the most accurate measure. And it ensures that there can be no prejudice or discrimination, because it is anonymous. But it is never used.

It is called an IQ test.

Despite what you might have heard, IQ tests are not culturally skewed. This can be, and has been, scientifically demonstrated. They do measure something real, because IQ scores tally closely with several other factors: academic success, career success, employee performance, and, perhaps most interestingly, criminality.

A low IQ score clearly predisposes to breaking the law. A high IQ score corresponds with never doing so.

You want honest employees, surely.

One reason that the use of IQ tests is generally frowned upon is that different ethnic groups differ in their average IQ. Use IQ testing, and, inevitably, whites, Jews, and East Asians would be hired in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population. For highly skilled or senior jobs, men would be hired more often than women. Our current quasi-religious dogma is that all ethnicities and both sexes are equal in average intelligence, and must be hired in equal numbers. Evidence be damned.

When you think of it, this dogma is no more sensible than a belief that all human beings are of equal intelligence. How could that be so? Is that your own experience?

But in fact, even the notion that individuals vary in intelligence is controversial. You get blarney like the “multiple intelligences” theory: everyone is equally intelligent, just in different ways. Quite wrong, in scientific terms. At base, the problem is that people do not want to believe that so much of what they can achieve is predetermined and beyond their control. People want to believe that, but for discrimination or bad breaks, they too might have been as talented and successful as the next guy. And they still might be so. In fact, if they are not, they have been swindled.

All of which, of course, is not to say that this is always a false assumption. There is indeed massive discrimination in the system.

We see it, for example, in job interviews.

But it is in everyone’s best interest if the person who can best perform the job is always the person who gets the job. Businesses become more profitable, prices go down, efficiency improves, pollution is reduced, and so on. Push comes to shove, you want the guy performing your brain surgery to be the most competent available, right?

IQ testing would be valuable in another way, if we only had the will.

Immigration is currently a hot topic. Those who want to close the door on immigration are, I believe, misguided. That would lead to a declining population, on current demographic tends, and a declining working population inevitably means a declining standard of living, and increased vulnerability of our way of life to outside enemies. Not to mention the liability of the growing numbers of pensioners. On the other hand, those concerned about immigration point out, justly, whether we admit it or not, that with immigration now comes violence—increasing terrorist attacks. Yet many recoil at screening out Muslims as a group. Others object that immigrants are taking jobs from poorer local workers.

Canada and Australia believe they have fixed the latter problem: they give preference to immigrants who are well-educated and well-heeled. Problem: the ruling classes of the Third World are terminally corrupt. That is why the Third World is the Third World. And we are importing them. We are self-colonizing with a corrupt ruling class.

Solution: a values test is a fine idea, but it can be too easily fudged. The dishonest immigrant will know well enough what answers are expected, and will have no problem supplying them.

How about an IQ test? Let in the true elite, not a corrupt ruling class. How about we let in only immigrants who score higher on average than the average Canadian? By doing this, we would be screening out the corrupt but successful through corruption: the worst element. We would be screening out those statistically likely to be or become criminals or terrorists. We would be screening for those likely to be economically successful, to contribute to instead of take from the general wealth. On balance, the brightest from abroad should not cost jobs to Canadians of any class, but create new economic opportunities for everyone.

And, since intelligence is indeed largely hereditary, we would be building for a permanently better future.

Besides being best for Canada, we would also be humanely screening for the ones who most need the break of immigration to Canada, and who could themselves most benefit from it. Their likely gratitude should cement their future commitment, in turn, to Canadian culture and Canadian values.

Shocker: Smart People Need Time Alone

Everybody is circulating this report that finds “smart people” need more time alone. As if it is news. Surely this is self-evident?

And the study itself seems clueless as to why this might be: “Smarter people can more easily adapt to their surroundings in the modern world, so they don’t need close relationships to help them with food and shelter, like our ancestors did.”

That is just stupid.

The real reason is only too obvious.

Have you ever spent a lot of time around children? In large groups? Didn’t you find it exhausting?

Now imagine those children are, on average, as big and strong as you are. Now imagine that many or most of them have a chip on their shoulder against you, because you “think you’re smarter than they are.” One of them is almost inevitably your boss.

That is about what spending time with others, especially in groups, necessarily means to the especially intelligent.

No doubt they would love and cherish the sort of friendships the rest of us are able to have. This is not available, except rarely,

Moreover, instead of sympathy, they commonly get tarred with the obscene canard of “lacking emotional intelligence.” It is all supposed to be their fault for being “anti-social” or “inept at social situations.”

Let us be very clear: there is no such thing as “emotional intelligence.” Intelligence is intelligence, and it applies in interpersonal relationships just as any other situation. A highly intelligent person is also going to be unusually perceptive about social relations, and about the feelings of others.

And he or she has to be.

The Curse of the High IQ

The world is designed by and for average people. Beung abnormally intelligent is like being ten feet tall. You are alsways tooping, and never comfortable.

IQ Scores by Country

Why Can't We Talk About IQ?

Jason Redwine asks.

Ph.D.s and Atheism

An acquaintance with a Ph.D. argues that the fact that few Ph.D.s seem to be believers is strong evidence that there is no God. That is, if the brightest among us do not think there is a God, that means there isn’t.

The first thing to say about this is that it can be no surprise to Christianity that most Ph.D.’s tend not to genuinely believe. The New Testament itself points it out. Those people who hold Ph.D.’s these days are the direct successors of the scribes and Pharisees of the Gospels. They did not believe in God either.

They were then, and they are now, the most learned members of society. But are they the smartest? That’s not clear. Besides Jesus himself, William James Sidus, with the highest IQ ever formally recorded, had no tolerance for the academic lifestyle. Almost no great philosophers or artists have been academics. Many if not most great scientists, too, have not held Ph.D.s. Ph.D.s may indicate no more than upper mid-range on the real intelligence scale.

That said, if you look not at Ph.D.s but at the acknowledged greatest minds of human history—the Einsteins, Newtons, Shakespeares, Descartes, Platos, Aristotles, Socrates’s-- most have in fact been believing theists. Even when that was not the social norm in their time and place.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; in the broader sweep of things, Ph.D.s in general may be the higher sophomores who think they know it all. The village atheists who have read a book or two, and think it explains the world. More characterised by intellectual pride than by intellect.

The academy seems to run on an idolatry of the human intellect. In that the existence of God puts stern limits on the power and majesty of human reason and human knowledge, acknowledging the existence and sovereignty of God can be particularly painful for intellectuals. Just as admitting that the spiritual world is vastly more important than the material world is particularly painful for the wealthy.

Nobody Voted for Piggy to be Chief...

So how come HE wasn't commander of the Enterprise?

I read an article recently from someone who claims to often give advice to the unusually intelligent. The advice, as I recall, was, “you can either be smart, or effective. If you want to be effective, explain your ideas to your colleagues to bring them along with you.”

Amazing to think that the unusually smart could not figure this one out for themselves.

Of course, they can. It is a common fantasy—perhaps an inevitable fantasy—that the unusually intelligent somehow need our help to figure things out. Terribly flattering to us, after all, if true.

But the author is quite right to see that the unusually intelligent tend to be loners, not the ones most comfortable working in a group. It seems quite rare that the person in charge of an organization is anything like the smartest person in that organization.

Let’s try to figure out the real reason this is so.

First, the author apparently assumes that the unusually intelligent think in the same way the less intelligent do, so it is simply a matter of walking through their logical steps for the slower minds among us. Why would this be so? I suspect Aristotle had something when he observed that the ability to use metaphors well was the mark of genius. Quite probably, the unusually intelligent are thinking in terms of metaphor, analogy, pattern recognition—think analog instead of binary—and do not themselves plod step by step, from premise to conclusion, even if fast steps. This would explain why, when there is more than about 15 points spread between IQs, the person with the lower IQ is generally unable to judge the intelligence of the person with the higher one. They are just incomprehensible. If so, this makes it excruciatingly difficult, in fact, for them to explain their thinking to someone significantly less intelligent, because they have to do it in a way quite foreign to their own. It is like asking them to invent the same thing twice using completely different methods. Exhausting, to say the least.

He spoke in parables.

Asking them to carefully explain everything to those around them, then, may be like asking them to run a three-legged race with a paraplegic.

But there’s more to it than even that. As the persistent notion that we can give useful advice to the unusually intelligent perhaps suggests, most of us are not terribly sanguine about the existence, let alone close proximity, of someone smarter than we are. We tend to all have a certain amount of ego invested in the secret suspicion that we are the smartest person in the world. When, therefore, someone else who is not in some official capacity takes the time to patiently explain something to us that we did not understand, we are not usually grateful for the help. Instead, we almost always take offense. He is, after all, blatantly acting as though he is smarter than we are. Who the hell does he think he is? We’ll show him! We’ll deliberately resist doing whatever he suggests. And we’ll get ours back at him the minute his back is turned.

So there is a huge incentive for any unusually intelligent person to avoid groups and group work of any kind. It is madness for him to volunteer for any such thing. Doing so is not just trying to run a three-legged race with a paraplegic, but with a paraplegic who is furious with you and getting angrier every moment.

Hence, the genuinely unusually intelligent are not going to rise to the top of any organization. They are, indeed, almost certainly going to be “introverts,” certainly loners. It is not that the highly intelligent dislike other people, and it is not that they are socially inept. Why would they be? They are simply practicing self-preservation.

And, not incidentally, the surest way to destroy their education and alienate them from any possible contribution to society is the current mania in the educational establishment for “group work.”

Nor, I suspect, is this a simple blunder among educators. It is at least partly deliberate. They too have their resentments of those more intelligent than they.

It's the Stupid, Economy!

Image, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, shows average IQs of various countries. Blue spectrum shows higher intelligence, increasing with darkness. Red spectrum shows low intelligence, increasing with darkness.



James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's structure, took a lot of humiliation in the press, and lost his job, for suggesting that some African nations were poor because their inhabitants had lower IQs. To be clear, his offending statement, verbatum, was:

“...all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing [IQ and Standarized testing] says not really.”

In response, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute insisted such a view was “utterly unsupported by scientific evidence”; and, presumably seeking to limit the damage to his own career, Watson himself issued an apology in which he insisted that “there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

But of course, as I pointed out in this blog at the time, there is. There was nothing inaccurate in what Watson originally said. It was a no-brainer, scientifically speaking. He said this in 2007. In 2002, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, both professors emeritus at reputable universities (Universities of Ulster and Tampere, Finland, respectively), published IQ and the Wealth of Nations. In it, the two estimated the average IQ of 81 nations, compared it to their GDP per capita, and found a correlation of 0.82—extremely high, for the social sciences.

You can find their ranking of national IQs on Wikipedia, here.

Of course, the fact that GDP corresponds to IQ does not say anything about what is cause, and what is effect. It may well be that IQ has a lot to do with good nutrition, for example.

But that has nothing to do with what Watson said. He made no guesses as to why the IQs of poor Africans are lower than those of Americans. He only noted that they were, and that this had to be taken into account.

For example, countries where the GDP currently lags what might be predicted based on average IQ seem to be very good bets for future development. On the other hand, in a country with low IQ, there is every reason to believe that significant improvement will, at best, take more than a generation. No matter how much aid money is thrown at them.

It also indicates that “affirmative action” programs cannot work. Pure merit, and colourblind selection, is the only equitable and workable approach.

An Inconvenient Truth

Slate has run an interesting recent series on the realities of race and IQ, in reaction to the recent general censure of James Watson.

Some striking hard facts:

Average IQ among Americans of European ancestry: 103
Average IQ among Americans of Asian ancestry: 106
Average IQ among Americans of Jewish ancestry: 113
Average IQ among Americans of African ancestry: 85
Average IQ among sub-Saharan Africans: 70
Average IQ among Japanese: 110

To give some perspective, I have heard it said that a difference in IQ of 15 points or more makes people’s thought processes mutually incomprehensible.

The author, William Saletan, also points out that IQ has been pretty stringly linked to brain size. This tends to scotch the argument that it is an arbitrary or culturally-biased measure.

A grim reality, perhaps, but reality is reality.